Recently there has been an increasing interest in the possibility of employing inductive energy storage in pulsed-power applications because of high intrinsic capacity of such storage and also the fact that this energy can be transferred to the load in nanosecond time scales. The key to utilizing this technology is the availability of repetitive fast opening and closing switches.
A number of new concepts and materials have been proposed for various types of opening and closing pulsed-power switches. Two salient features of these proposals are, first, the switching medium can be ionized and made conducting by a laser or an electron beam thereby closing the switch, and, second, the switching medium has a high resistance when the ionizing source is off thereby opening the switch. The optimization of the materials and the parameters of operation of these types of switches have been the subject of many recent studies which have concentrated on the use of gas mixtures as the conducting/insulating medium. Yet, there is a continuing need to develop a switching medium that can be made conducting with a conventional energy source and is easily manufactured and maintained.